The Acolyte is over – for now – and while we wait on news of a second season, Leslye Headland has been busy discussing the fallout of that memorable eighth episode and the reveal of a character fans have waited almost 20 years to see, peering from inside a cave on the ‘Unknown Planet’ (most likely Bal’demnic) where The Stranger resides.
“Plagueis was always in the finale, in every version,” In “The Acolyte,” he appears about 12 minutes into Episode 8 (also titled “The Acolyte”) as a sinister figure lurking among the rocks while Osha (Amandla Stenberg) and The Stranger (Manny Jacinto) head off to find her sister Mae (also Amandla Stenberg) who is trying to kill her former master Sol (Lee Jung-jae). But Plagueis’ presence echoes throughout the wider “Star Wars” mythology and its Expanded Universe of novels, comic books, and video game tie-ins. James Luceno’s 2012 novel “Darth Plagueis” concerned his ruthless quest to achieve immortality.
Headland said she’d been waiting many years for Darth Plagueis to show up in “Star Wars” proper; and she did, in fact, get to be the change she wanted to see in the world. But finessing Plagueis’ appearance in “The Acolyte” turned out to be as tricky to nail down as tracking a Sith.
“There was a version where he was the button of the finale [instead of Yoda],” Headland said. But having the sinister figure be the last thing that we see never felt quite right. “You want to feel Osha’s triumph. You want to feel her joining forces with The Stranger. Plagueis stepped on [that moment].”
Choosing to center character-focused emotional beats is always an admirable impulse. But it’s equally impressive that Headland decided to find a beat earlier in the episode where Plagueis’ spying wouldn’t distract from the catharsis of Osha’s ending, instead of a post-credits mic drop of the kind fellow series “The Mandalorian” has been fond of. “I was OK with having the cameo come so early if it meant I could wrap up these characters in a way that their final shot was not a, ‘And he’s been pulling the strings the whole time’ feeling,” Headland said.
